Lenny Distilled

Rituals and language shape culture more than policies

Leadership → Culture

Great companies has a very small list of golden rituals. And there are three rules of golden rituals. Number one, they're named. Number two, every employee knows them by their first Friday and, number three, they're templated.

Shishir MehrotraThe rituals of great teams | Shishir Mehrotra, Coda, YouTube, Microsoft
Supporting

If you want to create a moment that sticks in people's brains and sort of becomes a zeitgeist or something that they latch onto, you got to create an entity, a vessel for meaning, and then you got to fill that vessel with your meaning.

Matt MacInnis"I deliberately understaff every project" | Leadership lessons from Rippling's $16B journey
Supporting

The power of branding the mundane is so successful. Having a secret shopping meeting is very different to potentially coming in and listening to legal report out in your claims mishaps.

Laura ModiMastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable)
Supporting

I think as much as possible is getting to the point where you have alignment on the principles for what it means to build a great product of that company. Not just about if the intuition and tasting gut, but how do you distill that to principles that become the language of the company so that everybody else can start thinking through a similar frame.

Noah WeissThe 10 traits of great PMs, AI, and Slack's approach to product